Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 7 November 2018 doi:10.20944/preprints201811.0149.v1 Peer-reviewed version available at Religions 2018, 9, 373; doi:10.3390/rel9110373 Article A Mathematical Analysis of Maria Valtorta’s Mystical Writings Emilio Matricciani 1, *, Liberato De Caro 2 1 Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano Milan 20133, Italy;
[email protected] 2 Istituto di Cristallografia, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Bari 70126, Italy;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +39−0223993639 Abstract: We have studied the very large amount of literary works written by the Italian mystic Maria Valtorta to assess similarities and differences in her writings because she claims that most of them are due to mystical visions. We have used mathematical and statistical tools developed for specifically studying deep linguistic aspects of texts. The general trend indicates that the literary works explicitly attributable to Maria Valtorta differ significantly from her other literary works, that she claims are attributable to the alleged characters Jesus and Mary. Mathematically, they seem to have been written by different authors. The comparison with the Italian literature is very striking. A single author, namely Maria Valtorta, seems to be able to write texts so diverse to cover the entire mathematical range (suitable defined) of the Italian literature of seven centuries. Keywords: Confidence tests, dictations, Jesus Christ, Maria Valtorta, mystics, punctuation marks, readability index, sentences, semantic index, syntactic index, text characters, Virgin Mary, visions, words, word interval. 1. Introduction The history of Christianity has always been characterized by mystics, people who say they have had direct talks with Jesus, visions of Mary and saints, knowledge of future and past events.